Saturday’s New York Times had a great example of using variation to identify waste in the health care system

It’s almost never necessary to do two chest CT scans in a single day – one without contrast, the other with contrast. The ordering physician should know in advance whether she is looking for disease that requires imaging of the vasculature system.

It’s bad to do sequential chest CT scans of patients for at least three reasons. Each chest CT scan is the equivalent of 350 chest x-rays – and we should avoid the extra radiation exposure, which does cause some cases of breast and lung cancer. The cost of CT scans is high – CMS reports that these duplicate CT scans cost Medicare alone $25 million. Doing extra tests poses the danger of finding “incidentalomas,” findings that are not relevant to health, but that require additional tests which pose new health risks and additional expenses.

Yet there are some hospitals that do double chest CT scans on almost nine of every ten patients who get a single chest CT. Many hospitals are under 1% - yet the national average is 5.4%.

75,000 Americans had double chest CT scans in 2008.

I encourage you to look at the interactive geographic map showing excess utilization – it shows pockets of overutilization including Texas, Oklahoma, southern California, and the midsection of the country from Illinois to Mississippi.

Fee for service payment is one of the culprits here – hospitals with high rates of repeat chest CT scans make more revenue – and for a high fixed cost item like CT scans, make even more margin on this service. However, there is a straightforward fee for service fix. We should simply bundle together any two chest CT scans done on the same person at the same facility within 48 hours of each other.